IMMENSE as has been the anguish of the family of Joseph McCaughran, the East Lancashire grandfather who died after being dragged and hurled to the floor by a burglar's getaway car in Spain, it has surely been made far worse by the cruel indifference of the Spanish authorities.

Indeed, such have been the evident attempts of the police and medical authorities there not to trouble themselves with this crime that not even an appeal has been made for information about the incident and the official cause of Mr McCaughran's death has been put down as "respiratory arrest following a stroke."

The facts of the case cry out sharply for action far different from this casual and dismissive response. They are that Mr McCaughran gave chase to a burglar who robbed the family's holiday home near Torrevieja on the Costa Blanca. The thief ran to a waiting car and Mr McCaughran grabbed one of its door handles as it sped off. He was dragged a short distance before falling and hitting his head on the ground. Later he became seriously ill, was found to have developed a massive blood clot on his brain and died after emergency surgery.

These circumstances, put before coroner Carolyn Singleton in Blackburn, produced a reaction contrasting sharply with that of the Spanish authorities. She threw out the cause of death recorded in Spain and said it was clearly due to head injury. And she ruled that Mr McCaughran had been unlawfully killed -- a verdict that has triggered a murder investigation by Lancashire police.

It may be of comfort to Mr McCaughran's family that his death is being treated as seriously over here as it should have been in Spain -- where, one suspects, attitudes are influenced by the need to sanitise crime on the costas with the tourism trade in mind. But the need is now for the Spanish authorities to treat it seriously as well.

And Blackburn MP, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw should use his office to put pressure on them to do so thoroughly and urgently, not only because of what happened in Spain to one of his constituents, but also so that all Britons who are victims of crime there can expect justice, not a Latin shrug.